CIVICUS discusses Israel’s new death penalty law with Carol Daniel-Kasbari, Senior Associate Director of the Conflict Resolution Program at The Carter Center, a non-partisan organisation focused on conflict prevention and human rights. Carol is also a non-resident scholar at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

On 30 March, the Israeli Parliament passed a bill expanding the death penalty for terrorism-related offences. The new law lowers the threshold for capital punishment from unanimity to a simple majority of judges and mandates execution by hanging. Its wording is designed to apply primarily, if not exclusively, to Palestinians. Civil society has condemned the law as entrenching apartheid, while human rights experts warn it violates international law.

What does this law mean in practice, and what drove its passage?

The law lays bare the logic of apartheid in legal form, with different rules, different courts and different consequences based on whether the accused is Israeli or Palestinian. In the West Bank, the law operates through military orders that apply to Palestinians, while Israeli settlers remain under civilian law. Inside Israel, the wording about acts committed with the intent to ‘negate the existence of the state’ is framed to apply to Palestinians, not to Jewish Israelis who commit similar acts. That is the core issue. The law doesn’t simply punish an act. It sorts people into separate legal universes.

Apartheid is not only about land, movement or physical infrastructure. It’s about the organisation of law around hierarchy. One population is governed through full legal protections. Another faces military rule, reduced safeguards and now a distinct path to execution. The system no longer even pretends to be neutral; it codifies domination. As United Nations (UN) experts put it, this law creates a discriminatory regime of capital punishment directed solely against Palestinians.

This law came about because the far right no longer operates from the margins of Israeli politics. It helps define the governing logic. Rights advocates describe this law as initiated and aggressively promoted by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister. The celebration around its passage made clear this was never a reluctant security measure; it was an ideological victory. The law’s stated rationale centres on ‘enhancing deterrence’ and preventing prisoner exchanges, but political messaging and spectacle are built into its design.

This is what happens when openly discriminatory ideas move from rhetoric into statute. When legal institutions are repurposed to intensify racial separation rather than constrain it, dehumanisation is no longer just a discourse problem. It becomes a policy framework.

How does the law affect Palestinians in detention?

The law doesn’t automatically place every Palestinian currently in detention on death row. It applies prospectively, not retroactively. But it creates a new atmosphere of fear around detention and trial, particularly for Palestinians facing ongoing or future charges that could now be reframed as capital cases.

The danger lies not only in the penalty itself, but also in the speed and structure of the process. The law mandates execution within 90 days, strips away any realistic path to clemency and restricts access to legal counsel and family visits in ways that severely undermine appeals and independent scrutiny. As of January 2026, Israel held 3,385 Palestinians in administrative detention without trial and 1,237 people under its ‘unlawful combatants’ framework. In this system, compressing time while narrowing oversight creates a very real risk of irreversible injustice. In a system already marked by coercive detention and unequal courts, speed becomes part of the violence.

How is civil society pushing back?

Civil society organisations are resisting through documentation, litigation, public advocacy and international pressure. On 31 March, Adalah, together with Gisha, HaMoked, Physicians for Human Rights Israel and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, filed an urgent petition with the Israeli Supreme Court alongside Palestinian members of parliament. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed its own petition arguing that the law creates a discriminatory dual legal system based on ethnicity and violates the rights to life, dignity, due process and equality.

Resistance matters, but it takes place in an environment already under intense pressure. The CIVICUS Monitor rates civic space in Israel as repressed and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as closed. In plain terms, that means these organisations are not resisting from within a healthy democratic space. They are defending basic rights in an environment where dissent is under attack and civic action, including protest, is heavily constrained.

What should the international community do?

States must publicly and unequivocally demand the repeal of the law and make clear there must be no executions under it. This is not a routine domestic penal matter. Crucially, they must act before the first death sentence is carried out, because when lives are at stake, delay is complicity.

UN experts have called for an immediate repeal and the suspension of the European Union (EU)-Israel Association Agreement, which governs political relations and trade. Article 2 of the agreement makes respect for democratic and human rights principles an essential element of the agreement. But the EU hasn’t suspended the agreement yet. This would require unanimity, and while states such as Ireland, Slovenia and Spain have pushed for action, others, including Germany and Italy, have favoured continued dialogue. The political deadlock is real, but it cannot become an excuse for inaction.

In the meantime, individual European states should act on their own, suspending or downgrading bilateral cooperation, stopping defence agreements and arms transfers, backing stronger restrictions on trade and commercial engagement linked to illegal settlements, supporting targeted sanctions against officials implicated in grave abuses and expanding protection and funding for Israeli and Palestinian human rights organisations that are challenging the law in court and documenting its effects. These are not symbolic gestures. They are real pressure points.

Governments should also pursue diplomatic demarches, coordinated pressure in UN forums, urgent support for legal defence and documentation, and clear political and economic consequences for any attempt to operationalise this law.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.